Would slip from my own now if I could, the one
that’s taken too much sun—age spots,
wrinkles, moles, and that other spot I didn’t know.
Prepare for surgery tomorrow
and think of Mother’s kitchen, peaches dipped
in a hot bath, skins slipped off.
She needed no directions, made her own deductions,
round glasses steamed over, she
resembled a chemistry professor. Hair tied back
with a kerchief, sweat trailed from
her temples—pans bubbled like decanters when
she prepared what we called sauce,
a staple equal to our meat-and-potatoes suppers.
Bad spots cut off, pits removed,
ripe peaches halved for sugar syrup—Ball-jar bath,
a rack of eight, blue-enameled canner.
Tomorrow, I’ll listen the way I listened for her,
counted lids that “popped.” Mom’s
August operation a success only when the
good seal signals sauce safe
to eat all winter.
Born and raised in North Dakota, Madelyn Camrud is a graduate of the University of North Dakota with degrees in visual arts and English. She’s had three full collections published: This House Is Filled With Cracks and Oddly Beautiful, New Rivers Press; and Songs of Horses and Lovers, NDSU Regional Studies Press, 2013. Her poems have appeared in Painted Bride Quarterly, The Round, Soundings East, Water~Stone Review, Third Wednesday, Virginia Normal, and New Millenium Writings, among others.
